Northwood Space raises $30M Series A to build shared ground station infrastructure for the satellite economy

believe $30 million series A uh from Adrien Horowitz in partnership uh I think Founders Fund and a bunch of other folks got in the round. So, we'll talk to her about that. Bridget, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey guys, what's going on? What's up? Um I haven't been on podcast before. So, am am I on?

You're you're on you're not only on a podcast, but you're also live. So, there's no there's no post uh post editing, but hopefully we got the facts right, but you can break it down for us. Uh tell us what does uh Northward Space do and tell us about the $30 million funding round that just was announced. Yeah.

Um we're we're building the ground network for the industrialized space economy. Um, you know, we view it kind of as the third critical pillar of infrastructure for space where you need to get things into space on rockets.

Uh, you need to have things to put into space which are satellites and then you need a way to actually communicate with them and use them once they're up and operational.

And so we're focused on that last third part and building the the shared infrastructure that the whole industry can take advantage of really drawing parallels to the cellular industry and to the internet where shared infrastructure is just a big enabler for being able to push um technology forward.

Talk about uh what companies have had to do historically. You know, we've heard a lot about satellite companies that send a satellite up and they're like it's working but we don't know where it is. you know, so it's like, you know, kind of critical aspect of, uh, you know, you know, maintaining. Yeah.

What was the status quo prior to you starting the company? Oh, yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, it's not just prior to us starting the company, it's like ongoing.

Um, you know, we talked to companies I think like last week that are just not getting enough coverage and so they're endeavoring to build their own ground stations themselves.

Um, and you know, our our co-founder Char, it was actually interesting during our first fund raise, he was still working at his old company and he was woken up two times in the middle of the night.

There were a total of four ground failures just in the course of one evening while he was um manning their operations uh at all different locations, all different ground networks.

Uh, one was a site that had already been down and just like not even notified the company that they weren't going to be able to make their contact. Talked to another company last week that had been out of uh contact with their satellite for 28 hours.

Um, it's like, you know, you're not just tossing like a $50 piece of equipment up there. It's like tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, so it's very stressful and uh we're we're excited to, you know, pursue setting a new standard there.

Yeah, people get stressed out when Slack's down for like five minutes and imagine having like, you know, this hundred million dollar billion dollar device you don't have contact with. What what is I'm curious what does scale look like for Northwood? You know, how many different, you know, ground stations?

Uh, you know, do you hope to kind of get to within the next call it decade? Oo, decade. That's a long horizon, but that's fun. Uh, we are looking at scale both from like a network level and a site level.

So when you think about like why do you need to have a global network to begin with with space like the reason why you need to have a global network is because satellites orbit the earth and so maintaining contact with them um requires having uh you know locations all over the earth to make sure that you can be in contact all the time.

So think of it kind of like when you're using a cell phone and you're driving on the freeway and you're passing different cell towers. You need to have maintain contact with cell towers in order to maintain connection. Same with space. Um, and so for us there's like two verticals. One is coverage.

So you want to have enough coverage. So basically like a cell tower, like you're always in contact no matter where you are. And then the the other one is throughput. That's like density.

And so kind of gold standard for this is SpaceX where they have hundreds of ground stations to um not just have global coverage, but to be able to serve millions of users in different regions.

So when they're wanting to like service a region that has a lot of customers, they need to put a lot of ground stations in that region in order to support that much capacity. And so we want to be able to offer that to other folks so that they can have like that kind of gold standard of uh connectivity through space.

So um we're going to be putting um you know ground stations in different regions as well as ground stations densifying in the same regions. Um and one of the things that we think about with scale is really like how can we put as many ground stations to support as much capacity as possible at a single region.

So our kind of um you know sub near-term goal is 500 sites. Can you take me through some of the can you take me through some of the history of uh these ground stations? Maybe explain it in really really simple terms like maybe like I'm a venture capitalist or something.

Um something like uh how do we communicate with the Hubble telescope? Is this like a big satellite dish like what I saw in contact with Jodie Foster? Uh is that how we communicate with the Hubble or is there a different network of ground stations? What what what was kind of the gold standard 10 20 years ago? Yeah.

Um I have to just say like us ground nerds in space, we do not often get asked these questions. So thank you very much. Like the ground is just generally like the not sexy part of space. Um so it's very fun.

So yeah, I mean what you're doing is uh you know generally using RF to contact a satellite that is like hundreds of kilometers away. Um you need to concentrate enough power to be able to do that. So that's why you see like the big parabolic dishes it's concentrating power.

Um and so when you're you know further away that requires more tow more power. So actually um if you're you know in the PaloAlto area you go by the um the Stanford Dish is kind of a well-known one. And I imagine like some folks uh if they're watching might know of that.

Um it's massive uh a giant dish that's used to make that contact. And so it's interesting because like the legacy of space it's more exploratory.

It's more researchbased where like booking an antenna is kind of more like booking a telescope, you know, where it's like an individual piece of equipment where um you know they're located at these different locations around the world. You book the time.

you're kind of in control of how that functions and how it operates. Uh but as the space industry has been scaling, um that's not really a sustainable model to think of like as you're needing to coordinate, you know, tens or hundreds of different sites to think about that individual booking and coordination.

Um and with that, we kind of like to analy analogize to network routing for the internet where it's like you're not thinking of every single, you know, router and network switch. You kind of trust in a network that can reliably deliver that data.

Um, and so that's something that we're starting to think about about, you know, how the space industry is going to evolve in terms of communication going from uh booking an antenna like you book a science telescope to having the outcomes through um a global network where you can um you can have a lot of observability and control into that network but it's much more like softwaredefined um and controlled kind of like modern internet infrastructure.

uh question for now. I think there's an obvious opportunity to serve existing space companies. What kind of companies do you think uh are potentially enabled by your technology and network that uh may not have been smart to start five years ago if you didn't have kind of the resources of of SpaceX? Yeah.

Uh there's a company that we were recently talking to that I get really excited about. Um, you know, in LA we had the wildfires a couple months ago and uh absolutely devastating. Um, you know, really difficult to figure out where to route resources with a really fastmoving fire.

Uh, if you're trying to get a sense of like the scale and and the direction of that fire with a helis a helicopter, um, it's often like not safe or not even permitted to go into those regions because there's just so much debris.

Um and so satellites are a really interesting application where um if you're able to have uh enough revisit rate, which is what you know in the space industry call like being able to go over a region again if you're like a low earth orbit satellite where you basically just need to have like a bunch of satellites that pass over and take turns because it takes time to orbit the earth.

Um so having enough revisit rate to where you can actually like regularly track the movement of a fire is pretty revolutionary. like you can you could stop fires much more rapidly and be able to um detect the movement.

Um the challenge with with that is if you don't have um your your latency down low enough to um to be able to give the information, it's pretty much useless, right? Like if you deliver information like an hour later, then you can't um you can't deliver anything actionable and helpful towards firefighters on the ground.

Like they're gonna go into lives are on the line. I remember John and I I live in Malibu. John lives in Pasadena.

I remember the watch the watch fire watch duty went down for like an hour and I was like I was looking I was looking at the mountain behind my house just like being like if the fire comes over the hill I just want to have eyes on it quickly. Um and that was like you know very brief that it was down.

Uh I I I have a follow-up question. Um again maybe a stupid question but uh what is going on in the various uh different orbits? We talked to Albido about VL Leo. Obviously, LEO is kind of the hot one with Starlink, but uh do you need different ground station technology or scale to hit something in high earth orbit?

We talked to Astronis, which is maybe partnering with Impulse to kind of boost to higher orbits. Uh what are the challenges in uh or or benefits to different orbits when you're thinking about it from a ground communication perspective? Yeah. No, that's a great question.

um you know, V Leo like you're getting closer to Earth, so you're able to get um more like high fidelity imagery or like sensor um things like that.

If you go up to LEO, like um that's useful both from that perspective, but also from like a latency perspective when you're talking about like trying to hit internet similar kind of latency timelines, just the time it takes to go with those altitudes.

There's also operators in like Mio, which is, you know, middle orbit that are supporting internet use cases. Um, and then if you go out to geo, the benefit of that is like it's geostationary. That's what the name means. You're fixed at a certain location.

Um, and you're able to have really continuous coverage over a wider area because it can see so much of of the globe. Um, this is a super interesting area and an area that we're actually like really enthusiastic to be working in is is servicing multiple orbits.

Um, and yeah, I think it's it's both of interest on the commercial side and also on the government side. you know, they have a lot of assets um that stretch up into higher orbits and uh they're looking to have, you know, more capacity, more coverage, more resiliency.

Like there's really a shortfall of ground assets in the higher orbits actually. Um and so that's something that we didn't enter into the business planning on, but that's something that has been like a a very large driver of activity in our business over the past like 18 months of existence.

Um, and yeah, I I think like the more dynamic movement is also a really interesting point where it's not like you're just hanging out in one orbit, right?

Like that's kind of impulse impulse's really exciting uh proposition with prop um is that they're able to uh you know maneuver between orbits in um in new ways and uh you know in space economy rendevous proximity operations like that's that's something that's definitely going to be picking up and and very significant in the coming years.

I feel like Middleear Orbit is like super ripe for a Tolken named startup some found back thing. Um uh I I mean I would love to hear where the name Northwood came from. Um yeah, tell me where where the name come from and then I do have a follow-up question that's more serious. Yes. Um that's a very serious question.

Um the name came from the lakehouse where uh we first did our prototyping of antennas during pandem pandemic and it was the very origin of becoming a ground nerd. Um and so yeah that's that's kind of the history of the name. I mean that that lakehouse my great-grandparents got it in 1945.

It's just a little shack in New Hampshire and uh it's been uh kind of the all all the companies that I've had have had some affiliation to it. Got it. Uh, so on the business side, um, can you walk me through where you're playing in kind of the value chain?

I imagine that there's a fair amount of equipment that's available off the shelf. You might, or I, correct me if I'm wrong, but do you need to build the equipment from scratch?

Is this a project where you're going to be building like a gigafactory like what we've seen for the Starlink units at some point or is it more about um assembling different components and then being really strategic about placing them and then building a network on top of that and really like the services side of the business?

Great question. Something that our head of manufacturing Thomas thinks about a lot. Um we're definitely going to be leveraging outsourcing in early days. We we are a vertically integrated company like we we design all of the different uh components. Um we have those outsourced and then um you know brought in.

We're not we're not um you know like making our own circuit boards at this point in time. Um there's certain things that are like more efficient uh efficient to insource versus outsource.

Um so largely um leveraging outsourcing um initially I think you know we're really focusing on modular units and making our our units designed for manufacturing.

So um making sure that we can parallelize development, making sure that um we can have things ready to be integrated at like kind of the final hour is is the thought process just to accelerate our manufacturing uh capability and then gradually over time when we figure out like what is actually costefficient um and time efficient we bring it inhouse entirely.

Uh I want to know more about actually the mechanics of setting up a ground station somewhere. Um I imagine you could do it. been looking. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're thinking about doing my backyard. You know, I have some extra space. Uh are you going to pay? There's a lot of ham radio amateur folks that do that. Yeah.

I I have a I have a f a family friend who their family has some land in Napa and I think they monetize it by uh selling a cell phone tower right on top of it. Is that is that is that the the the one of the folks that you'd buy land from or um or is it on federal land? Like how do you think about placing these?

Do we need them to be equidistant across the United States and beyond? Are there other countries? Are you placing them in allied countries? Like, how do you think about the the coverage map, the Ver I want to see the Verizon map with all the different coverage points, right? How does that grow over time? Yeah.

No, it's it's real. Uh we do that modeling in house. So, um yeah, we we think in terms of like the coverage mapping and um the metrics that we're prioritizing hitting for customers. Um also shout out to Christian at Astronis who has his own amateur radios. We had a fun time talking about tune in.

Um, yeah, but in terms of where you put sites, it's a great question. Basically comes down to three things. Land, fiber, power.

Um, so you just need to optimally be able to um make your sites uh you know, we we prioritize making our sites as uh generic as possible really so that like we have the most optionality possible. Um, we are also prioritizing like really high throughput back haul.

So, um, data centers honestly become like a good spot to to put them at because they have the power in the back haul, um, already, uh, set up. Um, and, you know, generally try to just make sure that the land is like easy to deploy.

Uh, one advantage of the way that we're building our systems is we don't need to lay like a concrete pad, which can add weeks to months to your uh, time frame, especially when you need to like do permitting and all that.

So our goal is to make it so that you know the uh the tech bros of the world can just you know have one in their in their backyard very uh easily deployed easily. Um and yes it is it is a global effort that we're I remember and did something similar with the uh with the sensor tower.

They didn't want to pour the concrete pad because of permitting. So it's on wheels and saying it's completely unnecessary. You could just drill it in the ground but then it's way more complicated. How do your uh how do your timelines work?

Uh a lot of you know I'm assuming a lot of your customers are kind of planning around like launches and that means those are kind of busy moments for you guys I imagine but at the same time you can serve a lot of existing companies that have assets in orbit already.

How do you think about uh kind of the advantages that you guys have of like being on the ground and not needing to plan your entire business around SpaceX? Oh yeah, it's very convenient. we can work on our own schedule.

I mean, we have different challenges because, you know, you're going to different countries and they have their own local regulatory regimes and all that, but we we are not constrained by launch schedules, which is great. Um, and then the first part of your question was what was the first? No, you answered it.

You answered it already. Uh, we I have a I have a I have another somewhat random question. Um, we ask a lot of artificial intelligence founders about their P Doom. We ask a lot of space founders about their P moon. Uh what is the probability that you will visit the moon uh in the next 30 years?

Let's call it would you go if the capability was there? Let's say there's been 100 people or a thousand people or 10,000 people up. Are you going? And then what's the likelihood that you think spa the space economy and the flywheel that gets us to the moon happens based on your insider knowledge of the industry?

I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity. I I did hear from like an astronaut one time just how life-changing that experience was. And yeah, I mean I I feel like uh that would be definitely a thing for the bucket list.

As a mom now, I think that's honestly like the only thing that holds me back from We got to bring the kids. You got to bring the kids. It's going to be Disneyland on the moon. That's the first economic. We talked about this, too. Like we need to go to do we go on a Blue Origin flight? It's 250k.

Do we just go and podcast in space? John was John was all in. I was like, "My wife will absolutely kill me. " Uh, I don't know if it's worth it. So, it's definitely part of the calculus. Yeah, I know. To be to be young and wild and free. And like the the lunar economy, I'm very bullish on it.

I think um yeah, I think we'll hopefully see that within our lifetime. Uh somewhat related to space tourism, uh the Blue Origin flight did just happen last week.

I want to know uh specifically what are the challenges with uh with again uh connectivity because it seemed like we lost the video feed while they were at the apex of their kind of trajectory. Uh it was only three miles or three kilometers up or something. It wasn't that high and yet we still lost the live video feed.

Is that something it's a moving object but satellites move too. What does it take from a ground station perspective to uh you know be able to watch Netflix on your Blue Origin flight consistently?

Yeah, that was actually something that we talked about like in the very early days like pre-forming Northwood was like being able to watch Netflix in space and we're like, "Oh, wouldn't that be like such a cool feature? " Um I mean to accomplish that like there's multiple different kinds of the communication going on.

there's like how do you actually make sure that the rocket is going where it's supposed to go and um it's safe and like you know we talked to someone the other day who was concerned about like a rocket trajectory not going the direction it was supposed to and winding up like landing on another country and needing to deal with kind of like the uh catastrophe that falls out of out of that and managing that.

So like you really need to know where your spacecraft is going um because yeah the the consequences um that fall out of that are um serious. But then yeah having um actual you know humans on board needing to have some kind of communications on board.

Um yeah it's it's going in a different trajectory than a satellite that is just kind of conventionally like orbiting. Um and that's something that we're excited about with our technology as well is um being able to vary our beam width.

Um, so if you think about like uh you know the the signal as you get further away is kind of like a if you were to shine a flashlight on a table and like the the the area that the flashlight um spotlight covers changes depending on how far away the um the flashlight is.

It's the same thing with an object going up in space like it's changing the actual um signal propagation depending on um how far away the spacecraft is. And so you need to be able to have like some way of of tracking that.

Um, and we're excited through uh, you know, the the tech that we're developing to be able to to track the beam with as as it changes for more dynamic trajectories. Can you talk a little bit about the long-term uh, mix of customers? I mean, we've all been following Delian's uh, trajectory with Varta.

It was he was talking about ZBLAN at one point, then it was far pharma. Now there's some DoD mixed in there, some government contracting. It feels like a lot of these companies that are doing stuff in space or doing stuff in hard tech, it's dual use.

Um, is there a government angle here at some point or is that just something you're thinking about in the future? No, it's it's very near-term. It's very real term. Um, very real term. Um, very very real. Very real. Very real. Yeah, across a number of different applications.

I mean, they're dealing with the same challenges like if not even more so.

um where like they have a aging assets that um are kind of infrequent like there's you know certain networks that just don't have a lot of assets and they're old and they're vulnerable to outages whether it's like an intentional outage you know by somebody targeting that site or not.

Um and so there's been a lot of interest in how that they can leverage commercial to get um sites deployed quickly. Like for us in the conversations we're h having we're really emphasizing like we can deploy capability quickly um and we can serve up capability that's like quite scalable.

So if one of those outages happens you'll have that that backup and that resiliency. Um and so as you know government use cases um like so much of our world runs on space in a way that I think people don't really realize.

And so um it was you know that's been a refrain that you're hearing more and more through government stakeholders where there's this concern on you know if anything goes down in space or or through the ground connectivity it has ripple effects through like a lot a lot of our critical infrastructure.

Um and so for us to be able to uh you know deploy capability that can enable resilience there is something that's definitely resonating. This might be a silly question. Are you guys already making hardware that's actually on satellites? And if not, is that something you would do at some point?

Because I imagine when it comes to, you know, reliable communication, you're somewhat reliant on the technology that's actually on the craft. Yeah, that's a it's a great question.

I think like so far we've been pursuing partnership there, but like if the need presented itself to stretch onto that side, we have amazing engineers that would be uh very capable of of doing something like that.

Um but yeah, there's kind of a decomposition happening right now where there's a there's one company that just makes the satellite buses and so you could imagine that there's a different company that makes oh just downlink connectivity and then you kind of vend all that together and then you do the important thing and you can focus your company a little bit more.

Exactly. Exactly. That's the vision where you know in the same way that a developer doesn't need to think about like their you know networking or any of it. It's just like you just focus on building and Yeah, the rest is is kind of focus on that key value creation.

Uh when did you initially start researching or like catch the space bug? When did you get into this? I mean honestly it was around that that time of the um you know prototypes that we were making. Uh my husband Griffin is our CTO. Cool.

And so you know we were just uh working on those prototypes during the pandemic and um I feel like I don't pursue things as one does. As one does as one does.

Some some people were you know baking like some people were podcasting sourdough bread but you know rocket saw a lot of like new founders coming out of the pandemic too just like yeah too much time on your hands. Um we were fortunate to be in that position but yeah just can't do something casually.

I was just like all right and then after we did that we kind of like you know wrote a white paper with commercial folks and then we did another one with uh some government stakeholders and um like damn like this is a really critical vulnerability in the space industry. Um it kind of took off from there.

So, five years of work to get here. Can we play the overnight success sound? Overnight success. But congratulations on the on the funding round. Really really milestone. And congrats to you and the whole team. Come on next time you What are What are you guys drinking over there? Is that a yerba mate?

That's a yerba mate. I am. I am. Gui big uh yerba mate guy. But John's, you know, we have both. I'm having the third. Wait, this is like endorsement or something. But um yeah, we have the trifecta. The holy trinity of energy drinks. What are you What are you drinking? Red Bull. Red Bull. A classic. Very Lindy. Lindy.

Holy Trinity. The holy trinity of of energy drinks. Anyway, have a have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for coming on the show and uh love to have you back when there's more news. Thank you so much. Cheers. Bye. All right. Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Uh let's close out with some timeline. Um what else we got?

Oh, uh uh Mike N, former guest on the show.

uh has released the results from OpenAI's 03 model which everyone's raving about on ARC AGI and so his takeaway is that 03 medium because there's a million different varieties now for how in how intense and how longunning these uh these reasoning models can run for but 03 medium is the industryleading AI reasoning system by a large margin 2x the score and 120th the cost compared to the next leaning leading chain of thought system as measured by ARC v1 semi private set scoring uh 57% for $1.

50 per task. And that's interesting because we talked to Sean um Swix uh about how Google was dominating in this paro frontier of model capability versus cost. And they'd really we talked about this with Logan too, how Google has been dominating in these benchmarks and then cost.

But a arc AGI is this completely separate benchmark from MMLU and LM Arena and Humanities Last Exam and all these other things that are uh ARGI it's so simple. It's these puzzles but it's in some ways harder to game or harder to optimize for apparently.

Um and so um he says his key question for released 03 is it more like 01 slightly better than pure LLM on novel tasks or more like 03 preview? I love opening eyes naming scheme. Keep it keep it simple guys. Uh it makes this really hard to do my job.

Uh qualitatively new capability to solve problems outside training data. And so um we are going to be following uh the ARC AGI development very closely. He closes by saying ARC v2 which is the latest uh puzzle eval that he released. Uh ARC v2 still has a long way to go even with the great reasoning efficiency of 03.

New ideas are still needed. He called this when he came on the show. He said, "We haven't evaluated the new OpenAI models yet. We've heard rumors about them. We think they're great. Obviously, very economically valuable. Obviously, amazing tools. We love them.

But, uh, in terms of ARC Arc V2, uh, they're not solving that fundamental problem. And it raises questions about is it AGI? Is it 10-minute AGI? Is it it's it's AGI that can do like IMO level math, but it can't solve a puzzle that a kid can solve. It's a different type of intelligence and I think that's great.

I think it's amazing for the economic impact, but we still got our edge. We still got it. Humanity is not done yet. Um, but anyway, let's move on to uh some news. U the United States banned artificial dyes from all food products effective yesterday. Yeah, this is big.

We got to get Cali co-founder on to come break this down. I don't have full context. Uh, it seems like it's going to be incredibly disruptive to big CPG. Can you imagine trying to reformulate M&M's? Like M&M's? They've been making this for 100 years. Get ready to have some gray M&M's, folks. M&M.

They're still going to taste the same. Uh, actually, we'll see if they taste the same if they're not, you know, the color of the rainbow. Yeah. Uh, but I I I think this is good.

There's plenty of evidence that these different dyes like have really terrible impacts on health and especially considering that kids consume these and they don't have the same ability to reason. I have a different take.

I think natural immunity of the human body is incredibly resilient and so as long as you build up a tolerance to the poison uh you're going to do fine. So, uh, I would say just start slowly, micro dose the M&M's, build up your tolerance, and then you take a ton of artificial dye.

No amount of artificial dye could do anything to me at this point. I have consumed so much Celsius and so many processed foods that I am invincible. Some people say hubris. Yes, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Yes, I'm unkillable by the American food industry. Uh uh let's end let's end the show there.

We got to get on with uh Taipei. We do. But we will see you guys tomorrow. A great show. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. And thank you to the incredible corporations that make the show possible. Thank you.